Chapter #7Possess Adam by: Seuzz   The problem with getting ahold of Adam is that he is friends with everyone and with no one. He is rarely alone at school, so there are no opportunities to get close enough to shove some of yourself into or onto him; and you don't even know where he lives so that you could get to him that way. The guy is like quicksilver: attractive, fascinating, and impossible to catch.
Two days pass frustratingly, but you see a sudden chance on Wednesday June comes to you at lunch, gushing with news that Paul Zametti, Adam's band mate, has asked her over to his house after school to hang out as he and the rest of the band practice. Two thoughts immediately flash through your mind. The first, and far and away the most trivial, is that surely Adam, provoked by Melissa, has arranged this. The second is that this is your chance to make your move on Karter: Through June you can possess Paul, and through Paul you can possess Adam. True, you'll have to spread yourself across multiple bodies for a little while, but it should be doable. And heaven only knows when another chance like this will come along.
So you arrange to meet with June after school in one of the girls' bathrooms for a little touch up session before she goes over to Paul's. She's already there when you arrive, and she's alone, so with no prep or hesitation, you walk up close and grab her by the hair. When she shrieks in surprise you shove your mouth close to hers and vomit some of your blue body into hers.
It's been a while since you've had two bodies to play with, and this is the first time you've possessed two human bodies, you're aghast to find out how hard it is to control both of them simultaneously. So you totter each of them into a separate stall, squat on the toilets, and try to get yourself oriented.
You soon give up. You will need all your attention to run June, whose mind, of course, is barely open to you. So you suppress Dana's memory of assaulting June and drop into her subconscious so you don't have to manage her body too, and let her back out to be herself. She looks a little peaked as she exits the toilet to join June at the sinks, but you ignore her paleness and concentrate on getting June ready. She hasn't got the hottest body in the school, but she knows how to carry it well; and you've still got access to Dana's mind, and she knows where to loosen and tuck and smudge and sharpen June up. So you're feeling good about your chances to get Paul alone when you pull up to his house in June's car and in her body. Before getting out, you run her long fingers and nails through her hair one last time to tousle it a bit more, and touch up her lipstick in the mirror. Then you get out and go ring the front doorbell.
You stand around stupidly for a few minutes afterward, but no one comes. Eventually you hear voices coming from outside, and you walk around to the side of the house, where you find Paul and Adam smoking cigarettes and chatting. Paul's eyes glint in pleasure when he sees you, and Adam raises his chin in a casual "sup" nod. There are the quick and friendly "Heys" and "How you doings" and Adam's easy grin to make you comfortable. It turns out that Paul's family isn't home, which is why no one answered the door bell: only Paul and Adam are there, and they were out back.
"We actually got together early to practice something different," Paul says after they've tossed aside their smokes and led you into the garage. "We're hoping you'd tell us what you think."
It's an odd performance, given that there are only the two guys and their guitars, and that they aren't even playing what sounds like a standard rock song. It sounds almost, well, classical, with two separate, driving melodies chasing and tumbling over each other with hardly any beat going at all. In fact, for a little while you are alarmed that you might have completely misjudged Paul and Adam: they are having so much fun grinning at each other, and at one-upping each other while tossing the melody back and forth, that you're afraid you've been invited to witness some kind of weird musical make-out session between two closet cases. But you soon decide that this non-standard concert is just an excuse to get Paul and June close together with as little company to interfere as possible. Probably another one of Adam's ideas.
"That was great," you smile when they're done. Well, it wasn't, but given your anticipation for what comes next, it's not so hard to feign enthusiasm. You stand June up and stretch her arms high over her head, further exposing a midriff that a short-cut t-shirt does little to cover. "But I need to stretch and get a bit of fresh air." You walk over to the open garage door, then look back at Paul with a lazy smile. "You wanna come with?"
Now, Paul is not so dumb as to think June can't be interested in him; after all, she said "Yes" when he asked her to come watch him practice, and a guy shouldn't be asking a girl to watch him practice unless he's interested in her, too. But as you pose by the door, looking back at him, Paul seems struck by a sudden reluctance: either he's suddenly shy or he's paralyzed. Fortunately, Adam has the presence of mind his friend lacks. Out of the corner of your eye, you see him smile privately, then turn so that he jabs Paul in the back with his guitar; Paul jumps. "I still gotta tune this thing if there's someplace else you should be," Adam says with studied nonchalance.
Outside, you linger next to a side door that leads into the kitchen; there is no one around, but you've got it planned so that no one would see anything suspicious anyway. "Hey," Paul says as he comes out and joins you. His voice breaks slightly. You smile, push him against the wall, pin him there, and then start kissing him.
Paul seems more than slightly alarmed by this bald assertion of interest, but he's a guy and can't resist a girl who's got her mouth close to his. So you feel his lips begin to tentatively work under June's, and when you touch them with her tongue, they part.
And then you're inside him. He sags, and you have to hold him up by the armpits while continuing to kiss hungrily at his mouth. Soon, though, you feel his limbs. You straighten up, put your arms around June's torso, and hungrily kiss back for a few moments.
Now that you've got Paul, of course, getting Adam should be easy. But it is tricky maneuvering two bodies back into the empty house, where you stand June limply by the counter with her eyes shut, so you won't be distracted by having two separate visual fields to manage. You then turn as much attention as you can spare to Paul and walk him back out to the garage, where Adam is fiddling with his guitar.
"Hey, I got something upstairs I need to ask you about," you say to him. He looks back with bemusement, shrugs, and follows you up through the house (bypassing the kitchen) into Paul's bedroom.
"So, how's it going with June," he asks after you close the door behind you.
You wheel and shove him backward onto the bed, hard; before he can react you jump and sit on him. You cough a huge glob of yourself into Paul's mouth and blow a fat, pulpy mass of it onto Karter's mouth.
Adam twists violently under your assault, and his eyes are popping with surprise and anger, but you've got him by the shoulders; and besides, the part of you sitting on his face is alive and beginning to worm its way up his nose. He tries blowing it out, but then has to open his mouth to breathe; you quickly force more of yourself down his throat. He gags and chokes, and bluish-tinged bubbles froth from between his lips. Then he is still, and you feel Paul's body sitting on your new Adam body, and you open Adam's eyes and stare into Paul's even as you stare back.
You don't need Paul or June anymore, now, but getting yourself out of them is more of a production than you had counted on. You start by sitting Paul and Adam on the bed and closing their eyes so you won't be distracted by their visual inputs. You then stir June, who you have been standing stupidly in the kitchen, and walk her upstairs to the bedroom to join the boys. You set her in Paul's lap and push him back onto the bed; opening his mouth and hers, you dribble out of her and into him, being careful to first wipe out all her memories of the past thirty minutes. Like a sack of wet meat, she then falls unconscious onto Paul's chest.
You snap open his eyes and push her off; she tumbles in a heap onto the floor, eyes staring vacantly. You then lean Paul over Adam, open their mouths, and dribble long, bluish streams into him. When Paul in turn collapses, you prop his unconscious body on the bed. You do nothing about June; let her and Paul try to figure out afterwards what happened.
You can still feel Dana's thoughts, but you now only have one body—Adam's—to control, so it is now quite easy for you. You walk downstairs and enter the empty guest bathroom, locking the door behind you. In the mirror you see a stream of blue goo that missed Adam's mouth, and you carefully wipe it off and lick it up: waste not, want not. After that, you pull down his pants and underwear and sit on the toilet, carefully wiping Adam's mind clean of all memories of your attack; so far as he will be able to remember, he's been in the bathroom this whole time trying unsuccessfully to take a shit.
* * * * *
The experience of trying to run multiple bodies has left you frazzled and uncertain. It was one thing to control Dana and a cat simultaneously; to run two human hosts might be too much. Fortunately, to run Adam as Dana's boyfriend you may not need to fully control him; hopefully you won't need to do more than nudge his mind while leaving him in control, by making him notice Dana, and making him ask her out, and making him stick to her exclusively. Now that you're in him, though, you don't release your control just yet. His mind is mostly closed to you—closed in the way Dana's had been closed to you during your first day inside her—but you decide to take a chance on "being" Adam Karter for the rest of the day.
So after you've recovered your bearings and steeled your nerves, you back out to the garage, where you incompetently finger the strings on his guitar while waiting for Paul to come back.
He wanders in about ten minutes later, looking very confused and upset. "Hey, how'd it go with June," you ask him, innocently.
He looks freaked, and sits down and runs his hands over his closely shaved head. "We wound up in my bedroom—"
"Whoa!"
"—and I don't know what happened then."
"What do you mean you don't know what happened then?" You grin. "What do you think happened?"
"I don't know. It's like we passed out or something."
"Well, did you have your clothes still on?"
He hits you—not hard, but enough to show actual displeasure. "I mean, it was like there were gas fumes or something, cuz we both passed out."
"What, like on the bed?"
"I was on the bed. She was on the floor."
"Jesus!"
"And she's got like amnesia or something, cuz she started hitting me and saying I'd drugged her."
"Shit! Where is she now?"
"She left. She was crying."
You hop up and trot outside. Sure enough, June's car is gone. This is not what you'd been planning, but it doesn't disturb you a whole lot, either. She was just a means toward your end of getting Adam, after all.
Luckily, Paul's not in any mood to practice any more, so you smoke another cigarette and commiserate with him about June; then you slap him on the back and ride Adam's bike back to his house—you tap his mind to find out where it is.
You're a little surprised and disappointed to find it's a small trailer in a rotten part of town; you knew Adam's family hadn't got money—since he doesn't have a car—but this is less than you'd expected. Before going in, though, you sit down on the porch and drop down into his subconscious. At the very least, you want Adam acting most like himself around his family; moreover, you want to see how much "nudging" it takes to get him to do what you want.
As soon as he's on his own again, Adam becomes much more wary: you can tell from his thoughts that he doesn't want to go inside. There is a car out front, and this has made him cautious. He steps into the house quietly, and tries to make his way to the back. But he's caught.
Afterwards, you are grateful that you only had access to his thoughts, not to his senses, and so only got the experience second-hand, as it were. Suffice it to say that his mother, unexpectedly, was home, and was in one of her black, alcoholic fits of rage. You couldn't hear her directly, but you could "hear" his replies, as well as his unspoken thoughts and emotions. His own replies were cool, diplomatic, conciliating; his head, though, was a cauldron of anger, shame, humiliation, and guilt. He had to placate this woman, to soothe her, to get her quiet—and to keep her from throwing anything or hurting herself accidentally. This was tricky, and you could feel Adam's nerves buckle and strain under the weight.
But eventually he got her calmed to the point where the alcohol could take over and dampen her into sleep; once she was out, he called her work number and told them she was sick again and would be missing work. They weren't happy—this job won't last much longer; but then, they never do last long, the thought comes to your host.
He then went into his room and did his homework; he took a short break in the middle to make himself a sandwich; and at nine o'clock he went out to check on his mom. She was still asleep, and he executed the unpleasant task of moving her to her bed without waking her. That done, he went outside and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. He shouldn't, but it's either that or alcohol, and he will never touch alcohol. Never. Then it's back inside to sleep.
* * * * *
You listen to his thoughts and his dreams as he slips under, and let them run unmolested during the night. You've soon mastered his biography and have a pretty good sense of what makes him tick. His mother was an unwed mom, who had him when she was in her twenties and waitressing. His dad wasn't much in his life; in fact, he hasn't seen his dad in almost five years. Which is fine: the guy is scum, a good-looking but worthless drifter scrounging off the numerous women he's seduced in various states. Adam has at least three half-brothers that he knows of—though he's never met them—and is sure there are more. His mom's an alcoholic who can't hold even a menial job for very long, and who blames her miserable life on the man who impregnated her and on the son he fathered. She rages angrily at Adam when she isn't drunk, and rages at him even more angrily when she is, and she's more often drunk than not.
So Adam, you find, has coped by acquiring an almost uncanny ability to read people—his mother most of all. He knows how to pick his way through a minefield of bad conversational topics; how to read the signs of an impending explosion; how to steer it off or to smother it; even how to make her happy in those few moments when she is inclined to be so. He carries these skills over outside the home, which is why he is so preternaturally charming. He has learned how to please, and how to do so without being obvious about it. His perception is such that he knows most people better than they know themselves, and consequently knows exactly how to flatter and appease them when he wants to.
This talent could have made him a good friend and an attentive lover, but it hasn't. Quite the opposite: Adam's "cool" isn't an act, but a deep and almost inhuman chill toward others. He is, for instance, only tied to his mother by an animalistic sense of duty—like a wolf cub clinging to the tit of the murderous bitch that birthed him—but he feels nothing but icy contempt for the woman herself. He has never learned how to love, only how to manipulate and survive—and the same goes for everyone else around him. He has no close circle because he really does not like anyone; and he generously shares his company with everyone because he doesn't like anyone more than he likes anyone else: which is just another way of saying that he dislikes everyone equally. They are all just emotional "marks," people he can diddle with at his pleasure, for his own amusement.
He doesn't even have a sense of ethics: If he doesn't "go all the way" with any girls, it's only because he identifies such behavior with his father, whom he hates and whom (he knows) he in so many ways resembles. So he seduces, but never consummates; he treats his dates with easy familiarity and easy indifference. His deepest emotion is contempt—for himself as well as others—and he saves his deepest contempt for those who want to get close to him. He instinctively hates anyone who would want to form a family with him—because he is his father's son, and all the more despicable for that fact—and so those are the ones he teases most mercilessly. He embraces them only to cut them more deeply with subsequent, insouciant rejections.
This is not the boyfriend you had imagined for Dana.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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